Inhabiting Contemporary Southern and Appalachian Literature: Region and Place in the Twenty-First Century

5. Southern Appalachian Montage: Reviewing Books across Regions (A Collection)

5 Southern Appalachian Montage Reviewing Books across Regions (A Collection) This chapter functions as a concluding microcosm—a subregion, if you will—of this section on region and place. In addition to bringing to light some deserving twenty-first-century writers this book otherwise would not address, the compressed book-review format of these pieces forces my interpretive hand in places, demanding I make judgments and declarations which likely would remain more nuanced and considered in the more leisurely, extended essay context. Each review also reflects, to varying extents, the literary landscape during the particular year in which its book appeared. The organization of the chapter has the individual reviews drifting from southern regional contexts into mixed southern Appalachian accounts, before concluding with two reviews that are purely Appalachian in their concerns. As a final note, it is perhaps worth pointing out that these reviews appeared respectively in periodicals dedicated to specific regions, thus directing their compositions as well as the editorial hands that further shaped them. In this way, authorship, editorship, and audience become variables in regional context, all shaping the ways in which ever-arriving new books are interpreted and presented. (Re)Discovering Guy Owen: The 40th Anniversary Edition of Journey for Joedel Journey for Joedel, by Guy Owen. Winston-Salem: Press 53, 2010. Guy Owen fits into that tragic class of writer whose high quality work never quite achieved the readership or critical recognition it deserved and thus has languished out of print for decades, left to be read mostly by waning contemporaries, former students, and a handful of younger 104 · Part II. A Matter of Context: Region and Place oddball indiscriminate readers such as myself. It is a phenomenon particularly common for southern writers—a fact lamented by scribblers as far back as Poe and William Gilmore Simms—as demonstrated by their being largely shut out of northeastern commercial publishing circles for a couple centuries or so. Even now, it seems a great many southern hamlets and remote counties can boast an unfairly out-of-print and critically neglected scribbler or two. (Where I live in Virginia, for example, it’s William Hoffman, who wrote a half dozen astonishingly good novels, most of them published in the 1950s and 1960s, and some short stories which stand among the finest by twentieth-century southern writers.) The undeserved relative anonymity of Owen and his work in current literary and academic discourse makes a biographical capsule necessary. Born in Clarkton, North Carolina, in 1925, Owen performed both his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His first book, Cape Fear Country (1958), was a collection of poems, and early on in his career, he was predominantly a poet, producing three volumes over a decade period during the 1950s and 1960s. Owen’s prolific editorial work, some would contend, is of greater value than his writing. He founded the Southern Poetry Review under a different title at Stetson University in 1958 and edited the magazine for nearly two decades with minimal assistance and funding, publishing such versifiers of note as A. R. Ammons, Doris Betts, Fred Chappell, James Dickey, Donald Justice, and David Madden, among many others. He also edited or coedited eight books, two of which are particularly recommended to readers possessed of an interest in North Carolina’s literary tradition: North Carolina Poetry (1970) and, especially, Contemporary Poetry of North Carolina (1977). Given North Carolina’s current vigorous literary community, it is perhaps difficult for younger readers and writers to imagine a time when reading groups, workshops, and publishing venues were not readily available in manifold forms across the state. Yet these things did not manifest themselves of their own accord; rather, they were built slowly atop a sturdy foundation established by the arduous, groundbreaking literary labors performed long ago by Owen and his kind. He taught and edited across genres most everywhere in the state where one might have dared do so back then—Chapel Hill, Davidson College, Elon University, UNC Greensboro, North Carolina State University, Appalachian State Univer- Southern Appalachian Montage: Reviewing Books across Regions (A Collection) · 105 sity, etc.—and everywhere he went, he was an advocate for literary culture during an era when North Carolina desperately needed such champions. Ms. Dorothy Owen, Press 53 editor Kevin Watson, cover artist Benita VanWinkle, writer Sally Buckner, and the Press 53 staff are to be commended for bringing back...